Just received our winter screener results. Every single student who is "flagged" is an ELL student who would only be able to identify the pictures in the phonological awareness and phonics sections if they clicked the speaker button to have each picture read to them. There are two huge problems with this: 1--As kindergarteners, clicking every speaker button on every page requires more persistence than is developmentally typical and 2--This section is scored by the number of questions a student answers correctly in a given time limit. Students who have English as a first language know the pictures and can therefore answer more questions in the given time. Our ELL students are at a huge disadvantage.

To make this test no longer over-identify ELL students, the test should be modified to have the pictures automatically read to every student with the students not being able to make a selection until all pictures are read. An additional feature which could be implemented would be making these sections not be timed at all. Instead, make the cut offs be error rate dependent.

As it is, these screeners are not valid for use with ELL students.